There is another problem: programmers tend to focus only on programming, and forget to take an interest in the domain where they code.
For example, UI are often coded by junior programmers because experienced developers hate coding that, even though it's the most important part for users ! It's very obvious in some games, where the first menus, not being part of the game, are much slower than the game itself.
Using IQ tests and similar things will just make sure that you find people only interested into solving problems, instead on focusing on user needs.
What worries me is Google's obsession on the technical focus, and disdain of user (did you try the last GMail interface ?). I call that "Wow effect". But most of the users don't need any Wow. They need fast, stable and intuitive interfaces. I don't want to be forced to change my way of working whenever their GMail's interface changes.
No, corporate blindness. If the top management doesn't listen to all the hierarchy, this is the kind of problem that appears. BTW, this is a good lesson, as long as it is learned !
It's not quite right: Users know what they don't want.
It's mostly because they don't know what we developers can do for them. I believe that this is a communication problem, and developers are not very good at handling that kind of problems.
There are still a lot of things to learn besides programming !
I'm 46 and I earned my life coding since I was 20, so I have more than 25 years of experience (mostly in game programming). Plenty of Asm/C/C++/C#/VB.Net, etc...
Nowadays, I find coding boring, since it's mostly like building with Lego.
I have decided to change career, so I started practicing agility. I have been a public speaker a few times in agile conventions, because I have a lot of terrible experience (in game companies !), and I naturally know how to motivate a team (that is: not by using money).
I'm currently self-learning NLP and TA and all possible psychological tools, which are very easy to understand for me because when you code, you know how to be methodical. My goal is to become an agile coach.
So my advices: 1) learn psychology, you'll discover that it's fun ! (read about Agile, Scrum, XP, NLP, TA, GTD,...) 2) try to practice psychology whenever you can 3) use your experience to help teams as a coach (don't hesitate to accept a lower salary to build your experience)
I don't understand what you're getting at. He only made two real statements, neither of which yours seems to counter.
From TFA, Carmack says that the developers need to concentrate on the frame rate, which is almost the only thing he said. But he completely omits the game play ! (It's easy: search for the word play, there is none in the article !).
The GP stated that Doom 3 had no game play.
As a fellow game programmer, I think that the frame rate is less important than the game play. Of course, great games include both game play and technical prowess.
It also hurts to hear Carmack speaking of creativity. I personally think that technical skills are not "creative" (and yes, I programmed a lot of games and was proud to be technically strong).
If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?
I have followed this story since the beginning, so I'll try to explain what happened.
Almost 2 years ago, a team of programmers released an open source chess engine, named Ippolit: http://ippolit.wikispaces.com/home This engine was stronger than Rybka 3 (100+ ELO difference). Immediately, Rybka's author (Vas) claimed that it was a decompilation of Rybka, and succeeded in blacklisting this program from international competitions, without giving any proof !
A few months later, an unnamed chess expert disassembled Rybka 3 and compared it with Fruit. The biggest change is that Vas used bitboards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitboard to improve the speed of Fruit. The expert also detailed the small differences between Rybka and Fruit, his report was incredibly detailed and there was no doubt that Rybka 3 was a slightly improved version of Fruit (sorry, I don't remember where you can find his analysis). At this moment, Vas claimed that his computer crashed, and he lost the source code of Rybka 3, so he started working on Rybka 4.
I remember that Fabien Letouzey (Fruit's author) was worried that opening his source code would lead to commercial abuse.
Vas has always been dishonest about Rybka, for example by claiming that other engines stole his code (and always pretending that it didn't copy Fruit), or by displaying the wrong depth search (yes, Rybka does a 19 ply search, and displays as a 13 ply search !). Also, he used his results in the Chess Championship to make loads of money, which is quite irritating when you know the whole story, and this is why he deserves to be banned and cannot claim that Rybka is the World Chess Champion Program anymore.
At my job, the policy was to change passwords every month.
The guy explaining how to be able to keep memorizing the passwords gave us the following trick:
use your normal password as a prefix then as suffix, add a counter, like 00, 01, 02, etc... The idea is to increment the counter when the password expires.
After a few months, the management got upset about this policy, and we have now the same password since 2 years.
I think that the hackers used a few open L1 proxies on Amazon AWS.
In my list of open proxies, there are around 20 proxies on Amazon AWS, of the form ec2-??-??-??-???.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com:80 ec2-??-??-??-??.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80 where ??-??-??-?? is an IP address.
This allowed me to add IIS sites and app pools, install com components, install apps, run msunit tests, and basically do whatever I wanted to any machine on the domain.
As a.Net developer, I had to add some scripting facilities on our platform (32 2003 servers and 64 bits 2008 servers). There is a thing that is impossible to do in Powershell: IP restriction of a website.
The problem is that the IP restriction is a COM object, and there is no mapping in.Net.
Add to the fact that 2003 and 2008 behave differently, and you'll realize that it's a lot of work to even make the basic things.
And it was a genius idea to put the credit cards on a webserver !
You never expose your important data. If you really need to store credit cards, you put them on your local network, and provide web services to validate the data, but never store anything on the web server.
Microsoft Corporation will grant, [..] licenses on commericially reasonable terms and conditions, for its patent(s), [...] for the implementation of the Ecma Standard.
And it's just nice to have a few friends in the place.
I think that you confuse friends and acquaintances. Facebook strikes again !
Making friends at work is very acceptable, but reduces your ability to judge people fairly. I believe that it also reduces your ability to evolve, at least professionally.
I'm an introvert, but with extrovert abilities, and talking with people during lunch time is a nice way to be informed about the company. People saying that they don't participate are losing a lot of information, that might be valuable for you, or for understanding certain decisions.
Thirty-five years after Brooks, we still don't have the answer.
No, we have an answer : there is no answer !!!
For a small percent of teams, waterfall works. And for the remaining teams, agile could work. In all cases, you need that people believe in the way they work. If they have doubts, the project will fail.
People who think that Agile is a method are wrong. Agile is just a way to help the teams find the way they can work the most efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
90% of US bills carry traces of cocaine:
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-08-14/health/cocaine.traces.money_1_cocaine-dollar-bills-paper-bills?_s=PM:HEALTH
Now, let's suppose that you are a cashier, and it's a sweaty day.
After a long tiring day, you got arrested by the police.
Guess what ?
There is another problem: programmers tend to focus only on programming, and forget to take an interest in the domain where they code.
For example, UI are often coded by junior programmers because experienced developers hate coding that, even though it's the most important part for users !
It's very obvious in some games, where the first menus, not being part of the game, are much slower than the game itself.
Using IQ tests and similar things will just make sure that you find people only interested into solving problems, instead on focusing on user needs.
What worries me is Google's obsession on the technical focus, and disdain of user (did you try the last GMail interface ?).
I call that "Wow effect".
But most of the users don't need any Wow. They need fast, stable and intuitive interfaces.
I don't want to be forced to change my way of working whenever their GMail's interface changes.
Economy replaced Astrology.
Eventually, the number of believers will decrease, and a new belief will appear.
Just epic incompetence?
No, corporate blindness.
If the top management doesn't listen to all the hierarchy, this is the kind of problem that appears.
BTW, this is a good lesson, as long as it is learned !
I recommend a radio: Limbik Frequencies
http://www.limbikfreq.com/
which plays only trance-ambient music, with your mentioned artists.
Users know what they want
It's not quite right:
Users know what they don't want.
It's mostly because they don't know what we developers can do for them.
I believe that this is a communication problem, and developers are not very good at handling that kind of problems.
Here are the messages from ComodoHacker on pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/u/ComodoHacker
He published a cert for Mozilla in March.
There are still a lot of things to learn besides programming !
I'm 46 and I earned my life coding since I was 20, so I have more than 25 years of experience (mostly in game programming). Plenty of Asm/C/C++/C#/VB.Net, etc...
Nowadays, I find coding boring, since it's mostly like building with Lego.
I have decided to change career, so I started practicing agility.
I have been a public speaker a few times in agile conventions, because I have a lot of terrible experience (in game companies !), and I naturally know how to motivate a team (that is: not by using money).
I'm currently self-learning NLP and TA and all possible psychological tools, which are very easy to understand for me because when you code, you know how to be methodical.
My goal is to become an agile coach.
So my advices: ...)
1) learn psychology, you'll discover that it's fun ! (read about Agile, Scrum, XP, NLP, TA, GTD,
2) try to practice psychology whenever you can
3) use your experience to help teams as a coach (don't hesitate to accept a lower salary to build your experience)
It's never too late to learn !
If you want links, just ask me.
On the contrary, you should buy their game and ask for a refund because you cannot play without Internet.
After a large number of refunds, the large retailers will stop selling this game.
And they managed to involve the third devil: lawyers !
I don't understand what you're getting at. He only made two real statements, neither of which yours seems to counter.
From TFA, Carmack says that the developers need to concentrate on the frame rate, which is almost the only thing he said.
But he completely omits the game play ! (It's easy: search for the word play, there is none in the article !).
The GP stated that Doom 3 had no game play.
As a fellow game programmer, I think that the frame rate is less important than the game play.
Of course, great games include both game play and technical prowess.
It also hurts to hear Carmack speaking of creativity. I personally think that technical skills are not "creative" (and yes, I programmed a lot of games and was proud to be technically strong).
Here is the business plan of these newspapers:
1) Sue Google
2) Win , but be delisted
3) Wait for Bing to pay a license fee for their content
4) Profit !
Bing will easily attract the million of viewers that Google was providing.
And $250K is probably the price that the formation for Office 365 will cost !
They criticize pirates but can't keep their hook out of the booty.
Fixed for ya.
If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?
I have followed this story since the beginning, so I'll try to explain what happened.
Almost 2 years ago, a team of programmers released an open source chess engine, named Ippolit:
http://ippolit.wikispaces.com/home
This engine was stronger than Rybka 3 (100+ ELO difference).
Immediately, Rybka's author (Vas) claimed that it was a decompilation of Rybka, and succeeded in blacklisting this program from international competitions, without giving any proof !
A few months later, an unnamed chess expert disassembled Rybka 3 and compared it with Fruit.
The biggest change is that Vas used bitboards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitboard to improve the speed of Fruit.
The expert also detailed the small differences between Rybka and Fruit, his report was incredibly detailed and there was no doubt that Rybka 3 was a slightly improved version of Fruit (sorry, I don't remember where you can find his analysis).
At this moment, Vas claimed that his computer crashed, and he lost the source code of Rybka 3, so he started working on Rybka 4.
I remember that Fabien Letouzey (Fruit's author) was worried that opening his source code would lead to commercial abuse.
Vas has always been dishonest about Rybka, for example by claiming that other engines stole his code (and always pretending that it didn't copy Fruit), or by displaying the wrong depth search (yes, Rybka does a 19 ply search, and displays as a 13 ply search !).
Also, he used his results in the Chess Championship to make loads of money, which is quite irritating when you know the whole story, and this is why he deserves to be banned and cannot claim that Rybka is the World Chess Champion Program anymore.
What saddens me is not that Vas has been punished, but that all his team is punished:
http://www.rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Rybka+team
since I'm pretty sure they did a tremendous work in good faith !
BTW, the ICGA members are well known and respected programmers, so please, show some respect !
A quick search on the picture with Tineye.com returns the name Nicole Carroll, who posts about nutrition and dieting on crossfit.com:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl
The original thumbnail is here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/images/thumbnails/nicole.baeef534.png
At my job, the policy was to change passwords every month.
The guy explaining how to be able to keep memorizing the passwords gave us the following trick:
use your normal password as a prefix
then as suffix, add a counter, like 00, 01, 02, etc...
The idea is to increment the counter when the password expires.
After a few months, the management got upset about this policy, and we have now the same password since 2 years.
Let's rename Bing... Boogle !
TFA is totally bullshit.
I think that the hackers used a few open L1 proxies on Amazon AWS.
In my list of open proxies, there are around 20 proxies on Amazon AWS, of the form
ec2-??-??-??-???.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80
ec2-??-??-??-??.ap-southeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80
ec2-??-??-??-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com:80
ec2-??-??-??-??.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:80
where ??-??-??-?? is an IP address.
Would it make more sense to develop chips and systems that could be embedded _inside_ people?
No, because of allergies.
This allowed me to add IIS sites and app pools, install com components, install apps, run msunit tests, and basically do whatever I wanted to any machine on the domain.
As a .Net developer, I had to add some scripting facilities on our platform (32 2003 servers and 64 bits 2008 servers).
There is a thing that is impossible to do in Powershell: IP restriction of a website.
The problem is that the IP restriction is a COM object, and there is no mapping in .Net.
Add to the fact that 2003 and 2008 behave differently, and you'll realize that it's a lot of work to even make the basic things.
And it was a genius idea to put the credit cards on a webserver !
You never expose your important data.
If you really need to store credit cards, you put them on your local network, and provide web services to validate the data, but never store anything on the web server.
Did you want to say comically ?
And it's just nice to have a few friends in the place.
I think that you confuse friends and acquaintances. Facebook strikes again !
Making friends at work is very acceptable, but reduces your ability to judge people fairly.
I believe that it also reduces your ability to evolve, at least professionally.
I'm an introvert, but with extrovert abilities, and talking with people during lunch time is a nice way to be informed about the company.
People saying that they don't participate are losing a lot of information, that might be valuable for you, or for understanding certain decisions.
Thirty-five years after Brooks, we still don't have the answer.
No, we have an answer : there is no answer !!!
For a small percent of teams, waterfall works. And for the remaining teams, agile could work.
In all cases, you need that people believe in the way they work. If they have doubts, the project will fail.
People who think that Agile is a method are wrong.
Agile is just a way to help the teams find the way they can work the most efficiently.